Electoral 'democracy' is not enough- especially when the electorate in Canada laps up bologna and swings from LibCon to ConLib with monotonous repitivity//

We are now officially living amid the sixth great extinction, according to scientists, but the global economy has still not shifted to prevent climate change's existential threat to human civilization and much of the biosphere.

"The boundary between two epochs is visible to geologists as some kind of "marker" between layers of rock, soil or ice that are deposited all over the Earth over time. For example, the Late Cretaceous-ending meteor left a distinct layer of iridium.In the case of the Anthropocene, scientists note that humans have produced unusual materials like radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s."They've left a permanent record in our sediments and our soils and our glacial ice that's going to be detectable for millennia," said Colin Waters, a geologist with the British Geological Survey and secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group, whose members authored the new report."

Key questions remain, however, such as when specifically this new epoch began—whether it is old and pegged to the advent of farming or widespread burning of landscapes by ancient ancestors or is very new. In fact, some, including Zalasiewicz, have proposed a very precise start date for the Anthropocene: July 16, 1945, the date of the first test of an atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., and the beginning of the spread of rare radioactive elements like plutonium around the globe. The roots of the Anthropocene may reach back into the Pleistocene but the most evident signs point to a new epoch that began around 1950 when human population and many other signals like bomb testing really took off, leaving manufactured radionuclides that will be detectable for at least 100,000 years....And there is not even agreement within the working group itself on whether to propose formalizing the epoch, let alone its beginning, several participants note. "Many find it difficult to accept that an epoch that is so short in duration can be adequately recognized in geological successions, let alone the utility of it being formalized," says stratigrapher Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey, lead author of the new analysis.